Domestic production in Irish manufacturing industries plummeted in the first quarter of the year, according to new data released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
The figures show domestic production was down 32.5 per cent in the first few months of the year, compared with the final quarter of 2025.
Additionally, when comparing the year-on-year change with the same period of 2025, domestic industrial production dropped by 33.3 per cent.
“This Frontier Series release focuses only on what is being produced domestically in Ireland by excluding the parts of production which take place outside of Ireland as a result of outsourcing or contract manufacturing,” said Gregg Patrick, statistician in the enterprise statistics division of the CSO.
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A slight spike in March saw an increase in production figures of about 24.8 per cent. However, this was still a 36.6 per cent reduction on figures recorded in March 2025.
“The big fall is more an indicator of volatility than catastrophe,” said economist Austin Hughes.
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“It’s probably a couple of companies that are driving the volatility in this, so it’s not a barometer of the health of the economy,” Hughes said.
“If you looked at the 32 per cent decline, you’d say that’s an extraordinarily weak economic performance. But what it’s telling you is the extraordinary dynamism of these sectors,” he added, referencing Ireland’s dominant pharma sector.
“It tells you more about the nature of the Irish industrial sector than it tells you about the current health of the Irish industrial sector,” Hughes said.
Hughes also noted that the volatility of the Irish industrial sector was particularly impacted by Donald Trump’s foreign trade policy in 2025, which prompted front-loading of exports to the US and swollen domestic production last year.
The figures come as Eurostat records that Ireland saw the highest declines in the EU in industrial production in May, both month on month and year on year.
Irish domestic industrial production dropped by 19.7 per cent year on year in May, the highest drop recorded in any EU country. This was significantly ahead of Bulgaria, which recorded the next highest year-on-year industrial decline of 4.7 per cent.
This contrasted with the general decrease of 0.3 per cent across the EU, and states such as Denmark, Sweden and Latvia, where industrial production rose year on year.
